Notes on Student Suicide and Grief Management
Hello. Let me introduce myself. I’m Luis Felipe Sanclemente Llanos. A 45-year-old Bogotá native, I live and work in Bogotá. With over 20 years of experience in the audiovisual field, I’ve worked on a wide range of productions, in architecture, and in art. My path has been to follow a single rule: Ethics. What’s right. Even in my university years, I debated its meaning. I scoured the annals of German volumes: Kant, Hegel, Schilling. From then on, I addressed the continental divide and set sail toward the incognito of the island’s analytical side. Finally, captivated by Wittgenstein, I allowed myself to be seduced by his early writings, by his logic inherited from Husserl, and fell prey to his treatise. But over time, like him, I bounced from adolescent philosophy, Nietzsche, and the death of God, and I delved deeper into the ostracism into which the philosopher fell at the end of his life.
So I decided to swim back to the continent, dismiss the French with a slap, get drunk on the Spanish and their wonderful essays, where I met a great teacher who took me back to the origins: Hegel, Kant, and Hölderling. To understand ethics, you must have a deep understanding of German philosophical thought. But why begin this epistemological line to talk about what is correct? Although, in his book “Correction,” Thomas Bernhard offers a tautological description of the term and its continuous adjustment; what is correct is a personal criterion, and therefore an aesthetic one.
This whole philosophical debacle is used to claim that the search for logic, that is, knowing how to differentiate truth from falsehood, is not based on a logical criterion, but on an ethical one. We prefer the truth because it is good; we know very well how beneficial a lie can be, but logically it is impossible to deduce that truth is preferable in itself. It is with the invention of the critique of reason that Kant establishes bourgeois morality, which, because of free time, begins to educate itself in good taste. But woe betide Kant if he knew today that we call postmodernism its transcendence, and that with normative sciences, apart from making tapestries or Gordillo’s paintings of gamines fashionable, what he studied all his life with such rigor that in his village the clocks were set as he passed, is nothing more than leaving the guardianship of the world in the hands of bourgeois aesthetics. And why? If the pursuit of the universal imperative of what should be is to prefer goodness over evil, there is no way in nature, apart from the classic religious solution, to deduce that we prefer it; to goodness, the good, because it is beautiful. Beauty pleases without ulterior motives, therefore, it grounds logic and ethics; and while beauty is dictated by the art merchant who contemptuously pushes the artist who doesn’t sell at Artbo, while her ridiculous, snobbish, neon-lit clients decorate their rooms with what the rich buy. Or in this case, former presidents and their showbiz demagoguery. I swear the contempt with which they pushed my greeting listed the idiot who, as an artist, burned his neon sign, capturing his presence. And that was my friend’s mother, who must be from San Felipe, and the DJs of today, self-determined gallery owners, who believe that art and life can be domesticated, like the students from Javeriana who uncomfortably jump around, blocking the way. They either hang themselves in their homes, in hotels, or stuff themselves with Rivotril because life bores and depresses them. Their Instagram-like happiness doesn’t sustain itself, and boredom sets in again, which is nothing more than a state of mind where the self is perceived as a burden.
I’m writing this letter to Samuel, my 20-year-old artist friend from Javeriana University, who, shocked, tells me about the suicide of four of his university classmates in the last month. I scream, hurt, and tell him to raise his gaze and look at the others. I’m afraid of all those children we see around us, communicating on screens that represent them with emojis that replace their words, living a fictitious happiness derived from their connection through social media. This new semantics of the image that unites and separates them from the appearance of a music video on their Instagrams; this scattered attention of watching attentively for no more than three minutes that drives them to live bored and depressed, is a cry of warning to stop fantasizing about being connected by likes and by what influencers say, who are really just scared teenagers who forgot to speak and read. Please read a book; learn something useful; you are not the center of the world, and that’s no reason to die. With empathy for the parents of all teenagers with emotional problems and obsessions with feeling loved, know that you were poorly educated by emotional tyrants dependent on technology as a social support. Read Edmund Burke talk about revolutions and beauty; read Hunger, whether by Knut Hamsun or Martín Caparróso; please read Richard Sennett in “Flesh and Stone” and learn to relate your bodies to the city and the era. Read David Morris and the “Culture of Pain” to know that it has always hurt more, and that you are anesthetized on YouTube watching dancing and violence while the cruelty of reality that Didi-Huberman shows in his “Venus Cracked.” Read and do something more than marvel because you are alone and put the pain to work. This is Art and Pain, and like human shit, experience; only one takes one’s own.
These deep roots aren’t found in Greece, in an idealized polis; they’re found in the cradle of revolutions and in the bourgeoisie’s unbridled idea of educating its good taste. But what is correct is subject to a principle of adaptation to the individual that distorts the universality of the Kantian ideal. That’s why correct is corrupt. If I look in my country for the definition of being a correct man: it’s correct to be alive. Disturb whoever it disturbs. The lady with her Carulla haircut selling paintings, Lafauri displacing peasants to make oil and Nutresa hamburgers. Hamburgers that burn the country, massacring not only in the distant fields where the Black, the poor, and the indigenous live; displacing people in the border neighborhoods, where the Black Eagles are already exterminating culture. The dumpsters in Villa Luz, who already know that if we erase art, memory, and culture, we’ll be able to sell our souls again to the Spaniards who have returned for Movistar, BBVA, and the gas companies; while the landscape is depredated by the righteous Canadians who mine the moorland.
That’s why adults are enraged to see a young man take his own life. The grandparents have already made the decision, and those who remain will be silenced or annihilated without any other option. That’s why environmentalists shout at the adolescent girl for no reason, saying that gold doesn’t quell the bloodlust of our people. And if you’re fed up with phenomenology, go out into the streets and shout it out. (*Document attached in case you need instructions). Finally, if it doesn’t bother you, it’s not a protest. Look into the eyes of the Venezuelan who stabbed you nine times out of physical hunger, look at the Pastús prosecutor who told you he’s washing his hands of you, look at the Christian prosecutor who maintains two parallel homes and ask him if your blood-stained painting is pretty; because that disgusting beauty of the Bogotá petty bourgeoisie is what pays for the corralazo you get for lunch.
If you’re interested, don’t hesitate to contact me. If I don’t fit your cosmogony, go get eaten by a gringo and sell whatever dignity you have left in Barcú.
___
